I got my hands on a Dell 15z 5523 which needed a hdd replacement. After some powercycles the system wouldn’t power on properly again. It just showed a black screen which leads to a loop of 3 beeps or autopoweroff after 1 minute. After playing with pressing the reset button under the ram lid and even removing the battery I only had partly success with booting only once and then gone again. The problem is the uefi firmware which is updated or better messed up by installing Windows 10. To recover from this error you dont need to disassemble the device at all! Here are the steps:

1. Download the latest bios from dell
2. Create bootable DOS usb stick
3. Copy the xxxx.exe to the usb stick and connect to the laptop
4. Press the key “D” and hold it
5. Press the power button
6. It will come up black first so power off again
7. Repeat starting with 4.
8. The system will finally boot but might keep beeping 3 times
9. Boot from the USB stick
10. Reinstall the BIOS with xxx.exe /forceit
11. It will reboot to install the Bios again
12. After that the Laptop will boot up again properly
13. (optional) If it boots but still keeps beeping you have to disassemble it and remove all powersources and remove the bios battery. Reinstall everything and the system should be fine!

If I could help you please donate 5-10 dollars/euros to your local animal shelter!🙂

So after some sleep and wake-up cycles of windows my CD drive HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GT50N was not able to read DVDs / CDs anymore.

When a CD was installed the drive was spinning up very slowly and silent and just 2 loud movements of the optical slide and then nothing. No CD was identified at all.

Additionally, no error message was shown. Very strange.

So, i booted into my CentOS to verify the behavior. And, surprisingly, the same error occurred and the system was not able to read any disk.

I rebooted into Windows again, and as the behavior was still the same, powered of the laptop. Removed the battery and power connection. Waited for like 5 seconds, and bazinga.. the drive was working again, like nothing happened before.

As i never had these problems before, i think it might be some kind of energy-saving by Windows 8, which disables the drive and doesn’t wake up the drive completely, leaving it in an unusable state.

I hate giving to much information with emails i send. If you are using a native E-Mail client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, ..) you will most likely relay your email to a mail provider.
E-Mail clients are very chatty programs and do not hesitate to give out as much information form the sender as possible. These includes at least:

Attackers can use these informations to create specialized attacks against your infrastructure, as your email header provides info that f.e. you are using an old Outlook version with know vulnerabilities.

To prevent this information disclosure i perform the following header_checks on my postfix:

The Setup

I decided to put all my files on an external NAS. As I am using gigabit ethernet, this should be a great option to move away from direct attached storages (e.g. eSATA).

First i needed a itx case with lots of space for harddisks. I have choosen the Lian Li PC-Q25B as it has space for up to 7 3,5” harddrives or 5 3,5” harddisks (HOTPLUG) and 2 x 2,5” mounted on the bottom of the case. It even has a backplane which connects to your power- and sata cables. With the included rubber suspensions the harddrives lie perfectly save in the cage. The quality of the case is outstanding, all accessories, fans & screws are included. The price is around 140$ or EUR111.

As board i use a Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 (~130$ / EUR 100) with one PCI-Express slot for the raid controller, 2 memory slots, gigabit ethernet and a AMD E350 CPU onboard. The board is also good quality and comes with the IO shield.

The memory i choosen is 4GB of Corsair PC1333 in 2 x 2GB bars (30$ / EUR24). I later recognized the board doesnt support dualchannel as long as you use the onboard video chip so it doesn’t matter if you use only one bar. On thing to note is that the board uses at least 256MB video ram, so dont size your memory to small.

For the powersupply i have choosen a 350 Watt powersupply to have enough energy for the board and the harddisks. I bought a Xilence XP350 (~39$ / EUR30)

As harddisk for the operating system (CentOS) i selected a OCZ Onyx OCZSSD2-1ONX32G 32GB solid state drive (72$ / EUR 56). This is good for fast OS operations (bootup) and is quite alot space for the OS.

Dont use/buy a Silicon Image Raid

The Gigabyte motherboard and all other onboard-cpu-ITX boards dont come with a raid controller onboard. An other option would be a board with a core2duo socket and the intel ICH raid controller onboard. I didn’t want to buy an extra CPUs and Fans and that stuff so i have choosen to use a pci express raidcontroller.

Dont buy any of the SIL based raid controllers. They are fakes and not real raid controllers. They only support windows (or real old linux) and the raid is done by the CPU!!

Here comes the trick: Buy a Dell PERC 5/i raid controller card. This card is just missing the io shield as it normaly sits inside the server next to the harddisks. The port is a PCIe port. You can then remove the card holder, and put a default io shield on it (screw it, glue it,..). This card is available with 256MB cache and starts at 40$ /EUR 32). This card is a REAL Raid controller and is designated for SAS drives, which need a lot more io than a SATA disk. Anyhow, don’t buy any SIL based card! I tested 2 cards with the SIL3124 chips. On Linux you will see the harddisk one-by-one, on windows you will see…nothing.. wait… i setup a Raid 5 in the bios, booted windows and no new harddrive? the solution was simple. The “Raid” controller was so slow that it needed 90hours to initalize the raid! Wow, and the write performance is REALLY bad, ~15MBs. So forget any SIL adapter, buy a used DELL card instead. One thing: Dont buy a card with external SAS ports, it wont have any internal ports. You need a internal multilane port (This looks like a very wide sata port).

To get the ports from the SAS multilane to normal SATA connectors you will need a Multi Lane 4i,1x SAS 32p cable ($14/EUR 9).

I installed CentOS with an USB stick with the netboot image and installed the OS over the network. This was just straight forward.

With the RAID5 i now got a 6TB volume wich i formated with XFS to gain 400GB (you will loose them with EXT4)

You have to create the partition with parted as fdisk doesnt support GPT partitions (bigger than 2TB).

Wow, Microsoft did a great job with introducing a new shortcut feature for websites with the extension .website

This will bring a lot of enhancements if you are a browser masochist and like to have pain accessing Intranet pages with self signed certificates.

So the default problem of websites with self signed certificates (admin consoles, switches, storage devices.. you name it) is the annoying popup, warning you to not access the site but rather close your browser.

Now, as used-to-microsoft-polemic-messages-admin you just go ahead and install the certificate in the trusted cert store, add the URL in the “Intranet” zone and drag-and-drop a link to you desktop and BAM.. the link is not working as you thought.

What happened? The “Continue to website (Not recommended)” link is missing. So how should you be able to access your trusted internal website with a self-signed cert if there is no option to continue?

Have a look into the shortcut you created to your site. Funny thing that link is saved as “.website”. As you might know, until now all internet shortcuts had the “.url” extension. Microsoft changed that and introduced the more secure and featuref**ing extension “.website”

Microsoft had and still has a lot of security problems which forces them to implement strange security “features”, like blocking every active content on not explicit allowed URLs (Windows 2003/2008 Strong Security enabled), blocking downloads you requested to force you to click again,… or rendering shortcuts to websites with “spoofed” insecure, certificates unusable.

If you create a shortcut to a website now, IE creates the file and sets some policy settings in it. If a website uses a self signed certificate, the browser checks the shortcut, and sets something like “Block Access, Self signed”. You can check that by changing contents of the shortcut (with notepad++ or similar) and save it. The next time you open it, Internet Explorer disables it again and writes it back to the file when the browser is closed.

Solution:

Delete all the website shortcuts created with Internet Explorer and create your own ones:

Why the hell did I wrote the RMA NUmber on the Package. Should that not be attached to my account as soon as the package arrives? Why dont they know my adress again?
Additonally they want a shipping approval. There is not thing like that if you ship cheapest to China WITHOUT Tracking. They clearly stated that in their RMA Policy to not send with tracking number.
So this is my answer:

Sirs,

as you stated in you return policy a shipment has been chosen without tracking.
I also wrote RMA #917 in bold letters on the package, so can it be this hard to locate my package?

I sent it with DHL on 19.09.2011.
Here is my Address: xxx

And YES i know i will only get 10 EUR back from you for the shipping, but NO FRICKING PACKAGE SERVICE brings a package to Hongkong below 15 Euro.

Sirs, the device died 2 MONTH ago! With your extreme slow support and delay on any of my request your company makes a really bad impress. Could you please show that your support works and send me an answer in 24h hours?

EDIT: 2011-10-07

Wow, i received an automated mail again. This is getting rediculous …

Re: RMA 917

17th Oct 2011 @ 5:57 AM

Xtreamer.net Shop Said:

Dear Andre,

Thank you , we received your Scanned pdf confirmation.

As soon as our Logistic Department will confirm that your package was received at warehouse, your replacement device will be commence for shipping, and we will notify you by mail in your order, tracking number and shipping details.
Refund for shipping cost will be issued as well upon RMA policy.

Best Regards,
Xtreamer Sales Team

EDIT: 2011-10-24

Its nearly two weeks so let’s send another reminder.

Did you reveive my package.

24th Oct 2011 @ 4:01 PM

You Said:

Dear Sirs,

would you please be so kind and check your Logistic Department. Its OVER A MONTH now. I could have brought it with a rowing boat in that time.

Thank you

To be continued…

EDIT: 2011-10-26

Re: Did you reveive my package.

26th Oct 2011 @ 9:36 AM

Xtreamer.net Shop Said:

Dear Andre ,

We will investigate this issue , No reply yet from DHL.

As soon as we will get answer we will confirm you, no delay.

Your patience is highly appreciated .

With best regards,

Xtreamer Sales Team

EDIT: 2011-11-19

Where is my xtreamer 2?

19th Nov 2011 @ 10:28 PM

You Said:

Dear Sirs,

its now nearly 2 months since i sent you my xtreamer 2. I fullfilled everything you wanted, sent you the postage information and everything you need. But still i have not heard from you since then. Is this your kind of customer support?

Please answer me asap, when i will receive my replacement xtreamer 2.

Thank you

EDIT: 2011-11-25

Re: RMA 917 xtreamer 2- shipped DHL 173xxxxxxx

Delivery expects within 5-10 days, depending on how far you are from our distribution center in Hong Kong, We cannot promise delivery date as this matter is out of our control and Handled by third party.
Please confirm delivery, thank you in advance.

Best Regards,
Xtreamer Sales Team

EDIT: 2011-11-28

Its unbelievable! The replacement unit arrived just after 3 MONTHS of waiting. Nevertheless i received a replacement, this is the last xtreamer device i bought. I’m a very unpatient person who likes fast reacting support and moderate waiting times between all steps of a support call. I’m very disappointed how everything worked, and i went from a xtreamer entheusiast to a xtreamer avoider. Thanks for making this happen.

On 20th of September i sent the package with DHL to Hong Kong.
I wrote my case id on the package and did everything they wanted. But i didn’t received any info if the device arrived yet. My unpatience forced me to sent a request on my shop account today.

Lets see when and what they will answer. Maybe somebody from DHL is transfering the package with a rowing boat to china… Who knows?